Prelude to Everest: Alexander Kellas, Himalayan Mountaineer

By Ian R Mitchell and George Rodway

Acclaimed hillwalking writers Ian R Mitchell and George Rodway tell the fascinating story of Aberdeen-born Alexander Kellas, and his contribution to mountaineering from the 20th century to the present day. Now a largely neglected figure, Kellas is the pioneer of high altitude physiology, his climbing routes still in evidence today. Follow Kellas' journey, which takes him from the Scottish Cairngorms to the Himalaya, and discover how his struggles and explorations have impacted upon mountaineering today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910324080

Ian R Mitchell

Ian R. Mitchell was born in Aberdeen but he’s spent most of the last three decades wandering through mountains. He began walking and climbing in the Cairngorms in the 1960s, and he’s since built up considerable knowledge of the Scottish Highlands and also further afield—the Alps, the Pyrenees and Norway. He now lives in Glasgow and is the author of several award-winning walking books. In 1991 he was jointly awarded the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. He was also awarded the Outdoor Writers Guild Award for Excellence for his book Scotland's Mountains Before the Mountaineers.

Book preview

GEORGE W RODWAY (left) and IAN R MITCHELL (right)

GEORGE W RODWAY PhD is an Assistant Professor in the College of Nursing and School of Medicine at the University of Nevada and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine. He is the author of many scientific and historical articles and has been an active mountaineer in the Americas, the Himalayas and Europe for over 30 years, George lives in Nevada, USA.

IAN R MITCHELL is the author of numerous mountain and hillwalking books, and writes regularly for the outdoor press. With Dave Brown he won the prestigious Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing in 1991 and their acclaimed book Mountain Days and Bothy Nights was the only Scottish non-fiction work in the top 10 poll for World Book Day 2003. Ian has mountaineered widely in Europe and North America as well as in Scotland. He grew up in Kellas’ home town of Aberdeen and now lives in Glasgow.

FRONTISPIECE

The only known image of Alexander Kellas together with his sherpas. Taken at Tangu Dak bungalow sometime before 1914.

First published 2011

This edition published 2014

ISBN: 978-1-910324-08-0

Maps pp.9–14 (excluding p.13) © Jim Lewis

Typeset in 11pt Sabon by

3btype.com

Appendix ‘A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending Mount Everest’ reproduced with permission of Mary Anne Liebert.

Every effort has been made to locate image copyright holders. Should there be any omissions please contact the publisher.

© Ian R Mitchell and George W Rodway

The authors’ right to be identified as authors of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

This book is dedicated to Professor John B West MD, PhD – for bringing his pre-eminent knowledge of the history of high altitude physiology and medicine to bear on the resurrection of the reputation of the all-but-forgotten Himalayan mountaineer and scientist AM Kellas nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Acknowledgements

WE WOULD LIKE to thank Doug Scott for providing a foreword to this book, and also Liz Smith, Peter Drummond, Mike Dey and Alexander and Laura Mitchell for their help and support.

We also owe a big debt of gratitude to all members of the 2009 Anglo-Indian-American Sikkim (AIAS) expedition who most kindly assisted this project by providing many of the images found in this work.

Further we would like to thank the Royal Geographical Society for permission to use the many images by Alexander Kellas which are published, mostly for the first time, in the book, as well as the Scottish Mountaineering Club, University College London, the University of Durham (Bentley-Beetham Collection) and the estate of Frank Smythe for permission to use other images which appear in the book. We are grateful to Doug Scott for providing us with the main cover image. Uncredited images are in the public domain.

A Note on Nomenclature

Himalayan nomenclature is a problematic issue. We have retained the original usage of place and mountain names by Kellas and others in the quoted text, but after first citation in the main text tried to utilise standard modern map usage, as far as was possible.

Contents

Dedication to John West

Acknowledgements

MAPS

1The Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland

2The Valais and Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

3Sikkim, India

4Garhwal, India

5The Kamet Glacier, 1920

6Route of the Everest Expedition, 1921

Foreword by Doug Scott

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The North East Scotland Background

Aberdeen and the Cairngorm Club

CHAPTER TWO Exploring the Cairngorm Mountains

Mountaineering Apprenticeship

CHAPTER THREE Scotland, London, the Alps

Scientist and Mountaineer

CHAPTER FOUR The Himalaya 1907–1911

Kangchenjunga on his mind

CHAPTER FIVE The Himalaya 1911–1914

Going Native

CHAPTER SIX The War Years and After

Preparing for Everest

CHAPTER SEVEN Prelude to Everest

The Kamet Expedition of 1920

CHAPTER EIGHT Sikkim and Everest 1920–1921

No Country for Middle-Aged Men?

CHAPTER NINE Kellas’ Place in Mountaineering History

The Man not in the Photograph

APPENDIX Alexander Kellas’ 1920 paper ‘A Consideration of the Possibility of Ascending Mount Everest’

FACSIMILE MAPS Northern Sikkim, to illustrate a paper by Dr AM Kellas, showing route of Dr Kellas 1911

Preliminary map to illustrate the route of the Mount Everest Expedition 1921

Bibliography

Chronology

Map 1 The Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland

Map 2 The Valais and Bernese Oberland, Switzerland

Map 3 Sikkim, India

Map 4 Garhwal, India

Map 5 The Kamet Glacier, 1920

(Laltan Khan)

Map 6 Route of the Everest Expedition, 1921

Foreword

ALEXANDER KELLAS at his death in 1921, and for a considerable number of years afterwards, had an unrivalled reputation in the world of Himalayan Mountaineering.

This reputation was based upon the number of Himalayan climbs achieved, the lightweight style of his ascents and explorations, being the first to really champion the abilities of the Sherpa and his knowledge of high altitude physiology, which was second to none. For the latter reason alone he was such an important member of the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition during which he died.

Strangely, since the 1950s reference to Kellas in relevant mountaineering literature has diminished to the point where his achievements are all but unknown to the vast majority of mountaineers.

He did not write books of his exploits that perpetuated the memory of those contemporaries that did, such as Mummery, Collie, Younghusband, Longstaff and others to follow.

This book is therefore timely if not long overdue. In it the reader will discover all the climbs and explorations Kellas made, and it traces from early schoolboy days his journey from the Cairngorm Mountains to the remote Himalayan peaks of Sikkim and the Garhwal.

There is much more to this story than simply a list of events, for it is not only about his life but also about the times in which Kellas lived. It is good to be reminded just how fit our predecessors were before the motor car; in 1885 aged 17 he and his younger brother Henry walked the 35 miles from Ballater to the Shelter Stone in 12 hours, excluding an hour’s rest. The latter part of the journey being over rough country into the heart of the Cairngorm Mountains.

Kellas had without doubt enormous stamina and was able to keep going with inadequate food, clothes, and shelter for days at a time when young, which characterised his later Himalayan explorations. There are many threads running through the narrative that help us understand Kellas’ journey through life. It was a life that was extremely hard and often lonely since he appears to have been set apart from full social contact by inner voices leading to quite severe psychosis in later life.

It was only in the Himalaya, it seems, that he could find relief and be at peace with himself in the company of local people looking around the next corner or over that distant col. I had to read this book to write this foreword but once started I found it a compulsive and fascinating account of one of the great pioneers of Himalayan climbing.

Doug Scott

Kathmandu

Introduction

EVERY BOOK HAS ITS own particular genesis, but the current volume’s origin was possibly more particular than most, and involved a good deal of serendipity. Both of its authors had been independent admirers of Kellas for some time, but were unaware of each other’s interest in the man and his achievement, or even of each other’s existence.

To his shame Ian Mitchell had not heard of Alec Kellas until shortly before the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest in 2003, when the mountaineer’s name floated occasionally to the surface, though without there being any proper recognition of his real stature. It may be argued that few others were aware of the Scottish Himalayan pioneer either, but Ian was born and bred in Aberdeen, as was Kellas himself, and spent his mountaineering apprenticeship in the Cairngorm Mountains – as had Kellas himself. To rectify this neglect Ian wrote a popular piece outlining some of Kellas’ main mountaineering achievements for the Scots Magazine in 2003, based largely on the obituaries published at his death in 1921. Pressure of other work prevented him then carrying this interest forward, as did his awareness that he lacked the scientific background to be able to contemplate undertaking a full biography of his fellow Aberdonian, who was both a mountaineer and a high-altitude physiologist.

George Rodway was fortunate in that his scientific and professional training brought him into contact with the eminent high-altitude physiologist John B West, whose admiration for Kellas had led him to the publishing of several articles on the neglected mountaineer, and also to the publishing of long-forgotten material by Kellas himself, from the 1980s onwards. George found a passion for Kellas was infectious and he too began to correct this historical oversight with the publication of various materials, mainly in scientific journals. Then in 2005 he wrote an article for the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal on Kellas’ preparatory work for the first Everest Expedition, including an assessment of his scientific high-altitude biology work on Kamet.

It was over three years later when circumstances allowed Ian’s thoughts to return to Kellas, and when talking casually to Laura Mitchell (no relation) of the BBC in Aberdeen, with whom he was working on a totally different project, he mentioned that he was interested in the unsung mountaineer from the city. ‘He was an ancestor of mine,’ Laura informed him, and subsequently she sent Ian family materials of interest. Spurred on by this chance discovery, Ian wrote an initial letter to George inquiring as to the latter’s further intentions regarding Kellas, and George replied by return with the offer of a joint project, confessing himself not equipped to deal with the Scottish background, and with no prospect of having the time to become so for many years.

It was a fortuitous fit. Ian knew the Scottish material, and could cover Kellas’ period in London and also his Alpine experience, whilst George was not only a high altitude physiologist but also a Himalayan mountaineer, being familiar with Kellas’ main area of exploration and ascents in Sikkim. Both were experienced in collaborative writing ventures. It is a collaboration which has taken George back to Sikkim, Ian to the Alps, and both of us to Kellas’ beloved spot at the Shelter Stone in the Cairngorm mountains, where we survived a hurricane and the consumption of a bottle of malt whisky. Hopefully the appearance of this full-scale biography of Alexander Kellas will help to establish – or rather re-establish after three-quarters of a century of neglect – his reputation as a great Himalayan mountaineering pioneer, in the year of the centenary of his annus mirabilis, when Kellas not only climbed several virgin Himalayan peaks over 20,000ft, but also ascended – in Pauhunri – the highest summit then ascended by man. Tragically Kellas was unaware of this as measurements a century ago erroneously gave the height of Trisul, ascended by Longstaff in 1907, as being greater than that of Pauhunri. As with many other aspects of Kellas’ achievement, this work aims to set the record straight.

Ian R Mitchell

George W Rodway

CHAPTER ONE

The North East Scotland Background

Aberdeen and the Cairngorm Club

ALEXANDER MITCHELL KELLAS, arguably Scotland’s greatest ever Himalayan mountaineer and one of the foremost in the world during his own lifetime, is today a largely neglected figure. He was born in Aberdeen in 1868 and there was little in his background or his early life that might have suggested that Kellas would become a leading pioneer in the Greater Ranges, exploring and climbing widely in the Sikkim and Garhwal areas, and dying on the initial Reconnaissance Expedition to Mount Everest itself in 1921. He thus became Everest’s first ‘martyr’ and was commemorated in a memorial at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier (unfortunately destroyed by souvenier hunters in recent years), which was also a memento mori for (in addition to the seven Sherpas who died in 1922 and the further two who perished two years later) the much more famous duo of Mallory and Irvine, who were killed in the subsequent 1924 Everest summit attempt.

The Kellas name is quite a common one in the North East of Scotland from whence Alexander and his forebears hailed, and is of some antiquity. Alexander’s father, James Fowler Kellas, used to tell the tale that the triple sibling founders of the family had originally fled after some misadventures from Kellas in Morayshire, possibly during the civil and religious strife of the 17th century. The three fugitive brothers settled in the lands of Upper Donside – in Strathdon, Corgarff and Deskryside – and took the name Kellas from the land of their origins.¹ Today there are still many Kellases on Upper Donside. The family emerges from the mists of legend with Alexander Kellas (1738–1794), a tenant farmer at Newton in Glen Nochty on Donside, who was almost certainly an illicit distiller, as were all Glen Nochty men at that time. He was the great-grandfather of the mountaineer.

AM Kellas’ actual grandfather, also called Alexander, was born in 1783 in Glen Nochty. But he moved sometime early in the 19th century from the delightful rolling hills and forests of the headwaters of the River Don, shifting about 30 miles eastwards to the lowland farming countryside around the village of Skene, about ten miles west of the rapidly growing city of Aberdeen. There at Crombie Cottage by Skene, Alexander Kellas and his wife, whose maiden name was possibly Fowler, farmed. According to family legend, Alexander had been kicked by a horse and was slightly lame. This probably compounded his difficulties at a time when farming in the North East of Scotland was undergoing rapid and painful transformations.

The middle to later 19th century was a time of crisis for the tenant farmers of Aberdeenshire, who were facing rising rents and falling prices for their produce. The movement towards the creation of larger farms squeezed the small farmer, who often had to give up hope of maintaining his economic independence, and was forced to take up a position as a farm labourer, or to migrate to the town of Aberdeen for industrial work. It was a time of social and economic agitation, both from tenant farmers’ associations for lower rents, and from the emerging farm labourers’ trades unions, for higher wages.²

Alexander Kellas, tenant farmer in Skene, appears to have been a victim of this economic process, since financial losses forced him to give up the lease on his farm and to take a croft. Crofting was a largely self-sufficient form of farming, leaving a small surplus of produce to be sold on the market, and a definite step down from being a tenant farmer. Alexander died in the town of Aberdeen in 1862, which might indicate that he eventually lost even his croft-holding. At Crombie Cottage in Skene in 1821 was born James Fowler Kellas, the only son born to the Kellases, who also had four daughters.

James Fowler Kellas, who would become the father of the later Himalayan explorer, would have had no thought of entering farming at a time of agricultural economic crisis, so instead of following in the path of his father Alexander, he went into business, moving into Aberdeen early in life. He was apparently involved in railway contracting at a time when the railways were still expanding from the earlier-constructed main line to Aberdeen from the south, into the branch lines being built throughout the North East of Scotland in the 1850s and ’60s. But – again according to the family tradition – James lost all his money when his partner (an Englishman) absconded with their joint capital. At some point James married Jeannie Nickleson, known as ‘Bonny Jeannie’. Her face must have been her fortune, for her father was a journeyman blacksmith, a respectable but proletarian trade. The couple lived first in Marischal Street, a thoroughfare formerly consisting of grand 18th century town houses, though by the middle of the 19th century many of these buildings had become overcrowded city centre slums. Later the Kellases moved to Crown Street further from the city centre, this move in all likelihood indicating a rise in social status.

This slow rise up the social ladder was reflected in the fact that James Fowler Kellas could send his first son, also called James, to Bellvue Academy – a fee-paying school – and then to Kings College, Aberdeen University. But the precarious nature of the family’s upward mobility was shown by the apprenticing of the second son William Clark Kellas as a ship’s carpenter, a decidedly working-class occupation. This latter offspring subsequently died of an untreated chill at 19 years old.

James Fowler Kellas’ first wife Jeannie herself died of complications during her third pregnancy. James married again, to Elizabeth, the sister of Jeannie Nickleson, naming the daughter of that issue Jeannie, and on his second wife dying, married for a third time to Mary Boyd Mitchell. She was to be the mother of the mountaineer Alexander – who was to be one of the nine children she bore James. By this time, the year 1868, the couple were living at 28 Regent Quay in Aberdeen. This is given on his birth certificate as Alexander Mitchell Kellas’ place of birth, children at that time generally being born at home. Mary Mitchell hailed from Ballater, 40 miles west of Aberdeen, and the Kellases, including Alexander, were to maintain links with the Deeside town through family holidays. Ballater lay on the edge of the Cairngorm mountains, with the peak of Lochnagar being visible from the town, and visits to the village would likely have provided the young Alexander with his first views of mountain scenery as a boy. Ballater was reached by train from Aberdeen in the 1860s.

As well as bringing the Kellases relations in the countryside with whom to holiday, James’ marriage to Mary would also have brought him economic advantages (the tradition of the wife’s marriage dowry was still extant at this time), for her own family were prosperous farmers. Mary’s brother Alexander farmed at Sluivannichie just outside Ballater, where he rented 90 acres from the Invercauld estate and ran a big farm employing four resident farm servants. He was also a horse dealer and hirer, and managed an extensive coaching business, taking tourists from the Ballater railhead to the various scenic attractions on Upper Deeside. This was an enterprise requiring substantial capital investment and indicates that the Mitchells were a family enjoying definite affluence. Just as the future Himalayan mountaineer’s paternal grandparents had been victims of the economic change in the Aberdeenshire countryside, his maternal ones had clearly been its beneficiaries. The farm-house of Sluivannichie still stands, and remains within the Mitchell family, descendants of Alexander Mitchell being the present owners. The farm however was sold off and today its former land is largely occupied by Ballater Golf Course.

Regent Quay is right at the heart of Aberdeen’s dock and harbour area, and cheek by jowl with what was the massively overcrowded slum city centre at that time.³ It might thus at first seem that James Kellas’ fortunes had taken another downturn, reflected in the residential move to No. 28, but the opposite was actually the case. The couple lived for some years at this address in a flat provided in the building above the offices of what was the Aberdeen Mercantile Marine Board. James Fowler Kellas had become Secretary to the Mercantile Marine Board at a time of Aberdeen’s greatest economic expansion, involving the extension and almost complete remodelling of Aberdeen’s docks and harbour, to deal with the economic boom at the time, and the massive increase in its maritime trade.⁴ The Mercantile Marine Board was a quango, consisting of representatives from the Aberdeen shipowners and from the Board of Trade (a government department) and it was presided over by the city’s Lord Provost (the Scottish equivalent of a Mayor).

The tasks of the Mercantile Marine Board were various, including running the Royal Naval Reserve (consisting of merchant seamen who pledged to serve in the Royal Navy in wartime and were paid a retainer for the commitment), but mainly its work consisted in the examination and certification of marine engineers, navigators and seamen in their trades and crafts. It also ran a Merchant Seamen’s Fund and Savings Bank, and would have overseen the implementation of legislation like the Merchant Shipping Act of 1875, intent on improving safety at sea. The residence at 28 Regent’s Quay – now No. 49 – was above the Marine Board offices and the whole building was a substantial three storey granite-built merchant’s house built in 1787, with fine, very striking, Venetian windows. A side door into the building at No. 29 gave access to a ship’s chandlers’ business, and all around were the butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers supplying the needs of the local shipping fleet. Today the entire building has been renovated and turned into flatted dwellings.

ABERDEEN HARBOUR IN 1875.

The scene a couple of hundred yards from the Kellas’ house on Regent Quay, where Alec lived at this time. Notice the dominance of sailing boats, many working the China/India run. An exciting place to be a boy.

The Kellases moved into Regent’s Quay in 1867, and left in 1878 when Alec was ten years old. He thus grew up in an exciting place at an exciting time, and as a boy must have watched – even if only through the window of the house – the bustle of the dockside, and the coming and going of the ships, including the renowned ‘clipper’ ships like the world-famous Thermopylae, built in Aberdeen to carry tea back from the China run. His first decade on the harbour-side would have given the boy an idea of a wider world beyond the North East. Though the Kellas’ house – and certain others around, in which in 1868 some of Aberdeen’s elite still resided – were grand later 18th or early 19th century dwellings, the area behind Regent’s Quay was a warren of lanes of slum housing and industrial and warehousing units.

We know little of Alec’s first decade but it would appear unlikely that as a middle-class child he would have been permitted the freedom to roam these wynds and alleys, a freedom allowed to the local street urchins. We also do not know of his schooling at this time. The Education Act of 1872 introduced compulsory primary education for all over five years, but it stretches credibility somewhat to think that Alec would have gone to the local primary school. Parents educating their children at home were not obliged to send them to school, and one can surmise that Alec was home-educated at this time by a paid tutor, or in one of the several private elementary schools in the city. This practise was quite common amongst Aberdeen’s middle class, expanding in numbers and wealth as the city industrialised.

Aberdeen’s industrialisation in the 19th century was unique. Distant from the central belt of Scotland with the latter’s coal and iron resources, industry in Aberdeen utilised local raw materials from the land (granite, flax, wool) and sea (fish) to develop a broadly based economy dominated by textiles, food processing and light industry. The population of Aberdeen grew from about 25,000 in 1801 to over 150,000 in 1901. At the time of Kellas’ birth in 1868 it was approaching 100,000. Urbanisation in Aberdeen was also unique in that almost the entire population of the town, like the Kellases and the Mitchells themselves, were immigrants from the rural North East. This produced a town, or rather city, with a strong local identity and also a firmly provincial, some might say parochial, character. It also produced a town where many of the inhabitants still had strong family connections with the countryside. The Kellases were not unusual in this regard.

When Alexander Mitchell Kellas was born his father’s career was on a rising curve, and this was reflected by the subsequent building of a family house in the new and expanding middle class residential area of the city’s West End. Until the middle of the 19th century the Aberdonian middle class has generally lived geographically close to the working class, but increasing social segregation took place as the century passed, and by 1900 the social classes lived in broadly distinct areas. The residential pattern of Alexander Kellas’ family fits neatly into this process of growing social differentiation. Now a successful administrator in the world of commerce, James Kellas would be reluctant to bring up his increasing progeny by the Aberdeen dockside, and so in 1878 the family moved to 48 Carden Place, to a house that would be in family hands well into the 20th century. (No. 48 was then one in a block of two with No. 50, both of which have now been turned into the conjoint offices of a commercial company.)

Carden Place was a typical example of a residential street to which the lawyers, doctors and other upper professionals of the local middle class increasingly were moving, separating themselves from the slum and industrial areas of the city, and house building commenced in the street from the 1850s. Now the Kellas’ neighbours were not the colourful flotsam and jetsam of the harbour-side, carters, dockworkers and seamen, but people like clergymen, middling businessmen and a very large number of widows and spinsters living on annuities and investments. It must have been dull for the Kellas boys here after the delights of the dockside – even if those had been largely forbidden delights for them. The houses in Carden Place are solid middle class houses. These were too grand for the lower middle class, but they were also not the houses of the upper middle class, the granite palaces of the local plutocracy, which lay westwards towards Queens Road.

In the 1881 Census, it was noted that James F Kellas, who was then 62, had six children (and a nephew) living at No. 48, which was a large house of 11 rooms. Despite that, he had but one domestic servant